8 MONTHS IN: WHAT I KNOW, WHAT I DON’T &
WHY I’VE STOPPED PRETENDING OTHERWISE
There’s a specific kind of confidence that comes from starting a new job. It lasts approximately three weeks. You show up, you nod a lot, you say things like “totally, yeah, makes sense” in meetings where nothing makes sense, and you convince yourself you’re doing great.
Then week four arrives, someone asks for your honest take, and you realize you have been a very well-dressed placeholder.
That was me at Bonfire Red around month two.
I came in as the studio’s first full-time Senior Copywriter, which sounds authoritative. The title implies I had arrived somewhere. In some ways, I had. I had receipts to prove I could write. What I didn’t have was fluency in the particular dialect of a studio that works across wildly different industries at once. One week you’re deep in the soul of a human services organization, choosing words that have to carry real weight for real people. The next, you’re writing for a technical retail brand whose audience will clock your vagueness from a mile away. The week after that, you’re building a voice for a skate apparel brand where anything remotely corporate is a death sentence.
You can’t just write. You have to shapeshift. And shapeshifting, it turns out, takes practice.
Learning to say “I don’t know yet”
Month three is when I started finding my footing. Not because I had it figured out, but because I got comfortable saying, “I don’t know yet, let me think on it.” That sentence used to feel like professional defeat. It turned out to be the most honest, useful thing I could offer. Nobody wants a copywriter who fakes certainty. They want one who asks the right questions, sits with the discomfort, and comes back with something true.
I also learned that being new doesn’t mean being invisible. I’d been waiting for some unspoken permission to have opinions, to push back on a line that wasn’t landing, to say “I think we can do better here.” The permission was always there. I just had to stop tiptoeing.
Walking into a room where everyone already knows each other
Here’s what nobody tells you about joining a small studio: the team isn’t just a team. It’s a group of people who have known each other for years. They have shorthand. They have inside jokes that predate you. They can finish each other’s design critiques.
And they made room anyway.
Working with creative directors who can see where a concept wants to go before it gets there has sharpened me more than any brief ever could. They don’t hand you answers. They ask the question that makes your third draft suddenly obvious. Our project managers are the quiet architects of everything. They hold timelines, client expectations, and roughly 40 moving parts in their heads so the rest of us can disappear into the work. I didn’t fully understand how much craft lives in that role until I watched it up close.
By month four, I was presenting to full rooms and actually defending my work. Not aggressively, but with the quiet assurance of someone who had done the thinking, and who knew the people around the table had my back.
Small studio, big stakes
A small branding agency is an intense place to work. There’s no hiding in a department. Every word you write ends up in front of a client, on a website, on a wall, in someone’s hands. The distance between your idea and the real world is about one meeting.
That intensity is exactly what makes it special. When there are only a handful of you, everyone’s fingerprints are on everything. A designer’s instinct reshapes your headline. Your tagline changes the direction of a layout. The work becomes something none of us could have made alone, and you can feel it when it clicks.
Eight months in, I still learn every single week. I still walk out of certain client meetings feeling like I need a translator. But I no longer confuse learning with failing. Humility and confidence aren’t opposites here. They’re the same muscle, worked differently depending on the day.
And I’ve never felt more fulfilled by where I spend my days.
50 Ballerinas
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a song called “50 Ballerinas.” No context, just listen to this. It cracked me open and reminded me why I love my work. I love connecting things. I love feeling. I love helping others feel. It is what I feel called to do. It is what creativity is. It is what “becoming” feels like.
I’ve had it on repeat since, and it keeps bringing me back to the same thought: someone made this. Someone sat with something unfinished, trusted the discomfort, and came back with something true. Then it traveled from them, to my friend, to me, and now it’s sitting underneath the words I’m writing for a client I’ll meet next week.
That’s the thing about creativity. It isn’t a department or a job title. It’s a life force. It’s what moves through a designer’s sketch and a writer’s draft and a stranger’s song and lands, somehow, in all of us at once.
It’s what connects us.
And at Bonfire Red, I get to be in the middle of it every day.
